Lucky Star Moe Drill

Lucky Star Moe Drill is a Brain-Age style educational game for the Nintendo DS, but with much more cuteness! Based on the Lucky Star 4 panel comic, the player guides a character to intellectual victory by defeating all opposition in basic math problems, memory challenges, reading comprehension exercises and other fine logical tests. An adventure mode provides some lighthearted entertainment for those looking for a bit of structure.

Version Reviewed: Japanese Version Training math questions can quickly become a boring endeavour for students who are “numerically disadvantaged”. But if the wealth of edutainment titles for the Nintendo DS are of any indication, some executive out there must think that kids will play anything if it’s packaged into game form. Enter Lucky Star Moe Drill, a quirky piece of software that aims to facilitate mental betterment under the watchful care of the cast of Lucky Star. While Lucky Star poster child Konata Izumi is definitely not a model student, some of those Moe Drill girls are pretty bright. In “Nothing but Drill Mode”, the game ramps up in difficulty steadily as cast member after cast member is battled in a contest of brains. The nature of the questions seem to indicate that the game’s target audience is middle-schoolers, but the fast pace of the game lets it serve as good practice for anyone. Additionally, a local wifi mode facilitates 2-player challenges. Aside from the dedicated training options, there is also “Drama Mode”, which plays out like a visual novel punctuated by random bursts of educational mini-games. In keeping with the Lucky Star theme, the storyline is very much “slice of life”; not particularly epic, but perhaps able to rouse those nostalgic memories of that part-time job at a cosplay café? Cute graphics and cute music are plentiful in Moe Drill. Fleshing out the game options is an extras-filled “Gallery” mode with a few fun bonuses that elevate the moe factor to dangerously high levels. There are some nice voice samples for each of the characters, although when the game begins to cycle them endlessly they become rather tiresome. It’s also too bad that heaps of cuteness doesn’t save the game from its extremely touchy character recognition. With such dependency on quick stylus input for answers, it has far too much trouble distinguishing between the numbers 9, 7 and 1. Repeatedly failing to solve “4+5=” due to software misinterpretation is incredibly frustrating!

Players who don’t understand Japanese will be limited in their enjoyment of this title, but numbers are numbers and the mini-games are generally universal in nature. There’s really not a lot of depth, but for presenting an interesting twist on the traditional self-improvement game, Moe Drill can at least be considered reasonably successful. Fans of Lucky Star won’t be disappointed by this cute learning tool, and students with a high tolerance for buckets of moe will find Moe Drill a worthwhile experience.